Category Archives: Culture

Artificial Eternity

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One of the clarifying things about Trump’s second term is that we are seeing the reality of politics on display. He made deals for support and right away he is making good on those deals. One of those deals was with Silicon Valley with regards to Artificial Intelligence, which they think is the next revolution. Trump is pledging billions for something like a Manhattan Project to make AI real. Here is Sam Altman explaining why this is the greatest thing ever.

Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever, but it is not the first time this has come up with the tech bros. Once Silicon Valley was awash in billions, they started investing some of it in life extension technology with the hope of conquering death. Ray Kurzweil has made a nice living selling life-extension ideas to the tech bros.

It is fair to say that conquering death has been an obsession with Silicon Valley since the great boom of the 1990’s started. Perhaps there is some natural link between extending human ability through technology and extending life with it. On the one hand, solving the complex mathematical puzzles that put the stock of human knowledge at your fingertips leads to hubris. On the other hand, that same hubris can easily lead to a view of life as nothing more than complex math puzzles.

Much of what lies behind the synopticon that Silicon Valley has rolled out over the last decades is the assumption that life is not terribly complicated because humans are relatively simple in their actions. Facebook and Google easily roll up our lives into easy-to-use data sets, so marketers can nudge us into buying their products. The fact that this strategy does not work is ignored. They have come to believe that the vast network of machines is controlling human behavior.

That aside, conquering death is not new to this age. Christianity is all about conquering death and living forever in bliss. That is the main point of Christianity, at least from the marketing point of view. If you live an ethical life, when you die and your life is put in the scales, you will gain access to heaven, which is everlasting life. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”

The Christians were not the first to think this way. In fact, it was most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which held that heaven was one option for your soul once it left your body and crossed Bridge of Judgment. Of course, the concept of reincarnation has been with us since forever probably. The soul reentering the material world in the body of another human or as another species is a form of conquering death. The soul is eternal, so you never truly die.

In folk religions without a complex system of ethics tied to their deity, conquering death was still an important topic. The ancient heroes fought to be remembered after they had fallen in battle. Valhalla, which was reworked by early Christians into a warrior heaven, was originally just a resting place for warriors, until they poured out to fight alongside Odin against the jötnar during Ragnarök. Conquering death was to live so you could take part in the final scene of existence.

Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. Greek mythology is a great example of this. To be remembered was the point of life. The great heroes of the long-forgotten past are proof that a man can outlive his people. Troy, for example, was long gone by the time of Homer, but the men of Troy and those who defeated them, lived on long after Troy was forgotten. Our modern cemeteries still reflect this ancient urge to be remembered and thus conquer death.

in the modern age, men who aspire to greatness are not satisfied with having their memory carved on a rock. They will not blink their last blink with the knowledge that they will live forever at the foot of God. Both require a connection to a people who will maintain the rock or pray for your soul. Instead, they hope the machines with which they spend so much of their lives will save them from rotting away in a field or being incinerated in a crematorium.

Despite their brilliance, they not only think little about their obsession with immortality, but they never wonder if it is what they want. To this point, people have understood that living even a very long time comes with punishments. Our fiction is full of examples of men who lived too long. Even in good health, their psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit. We have always had a sense that who we are is tied to the brevity of our time on this world.

Artificial Intelligence may help mitigate diseases like cancer, but at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes. The walls that contain AI right now, the limits of human knowledge, will probably prove impenetrable. It will never be able to go beyond what we know but merely be faster at accessing and applying it. That will have its uses but will fall far short of the robot future. Until we unriddle what makes human consciousness possible, AI will remain a fantasy.

Nature, of nature’s God, has a sense of humor, so the most likely result of AI is better ways to kill one another. We already see that with the war in Ukraine where AI powered drones hunt for men and equipment. This is another thing the present quest for eternal life shares with the past quests. The end result will inevitably require death, as without death, life is not possible. Living is not merely the absence of death but the struggle against death. Artificial Intelligence cannot do that for us.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Racism: The Death Of A Concept

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The concept of racism is a novelty of the twentieth century that in recent times has been treated as a timeless truth. In the last century, the best people decided that their fellow white people had been living in sin because they had not welcomed the descendants of former slaves into their lives, so they set about correcting it. What started as a project to better the material condition of black people and include them into general society, slowly transformed into a cult of leukophobia.

It is a good example of how a negative identity can both spread and slowly destroy the people who embrace it. The first “antiracists” were sober minded compared to the modern version, in that they simply wanted to address the practical problem of incorporating the black population into the American legal system. As a practical matter, the United States had two legal frameworks into the twentieth century, one for the white population and one for the black population.

The fact that this dual legal system existed in America is a great example of how practical necessity must always come before the ideal. America was born, in part, in the notion of equality before the law. It nearly tore itself apart in a civil war over this very same issue, but into the twentieth century the majority of Americans, of both races, were comfortable with a two-tier legal system. It was this gap between the ideal and reality through which antiracism entered.

Those first “antiracists” were opposed to this dual legal system. Soon they were opposed to the people who defended it and then opposed to the human reality that perpetuated it despite reforms in the law. The civil rights revolution in the middle of the last century went beyond eliminating the dual legal system. It was aimed at eradicating the conditions that made it possible. Those conditions, it was assumed, were in the hearts and minds of the white population.

This version of the Great Awakening was motivated by a desire to once and for all eliminate that which makes racial inequality possible. Instead of pulling up at the water’s edge of biological reality, the reformers imagined that they were smashing into the final defenses of racism and the racists who made it possible. That sin of racism discovered in the last century was anthropomorphized into an army of imaginary devils, against which the great and the good could rally.

The last generation of madness has been in pursuit of what Chief Justice John Roberts called the folly of trying to create equality from inequality. Not only are differences in individual people immutable, differences on groups of people are immutable, but that itself became one of the deadly sins of antiracism. The stubbornness of this reality just made the antiracist more determined until they embraced state sponsored violence against this imaginary evil.

Whether they understood what they were doing is unclear, but what antiracism became was a mirror of what they claimed was white racism. This started with shifting the definition of racism from “prejudice based on race” to “prejudice plus power”, which meant only whites could be racist. Since hating white people was not new, they shifted to hating whiteness, the condition that produce white people. The result was a moral code built on the hatred of white people, leukophobia.

In the final decades of the last century, American children were taught about the cultural lunacy in communist countries like Russia and China. They would struggle to accept that people could submit to reeducation camps and struggle sessions run by crazy people at war with reality. In the fullness of time, children will look at the diversity pogroms of this age the same way. Future children will struggle to believe that psychopathic con artist like Robin DiAngelo were real.

Like the madness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the bloody madness of Stalin’s purges, the madness of antiracism has run its course. Yesterday, Trump signed another executive order, this one rescinding Lyndon Johnson’s EO 11246, which established affirmative action in government contracting. Ten years ago, anyone suggesting this was called a white nationalist and purged from polite company. Suddenly it is in the trophy case of the most banal political activists.

What we are experiencing right now is a preference cascade. Long ago, a wiseman said that antiracism would collapse on the day a so-called conservative professed his antiracism in front of a gathering and that gathering started to chuckle and then burst into uproarious laughter as they all realized the same thing. That thing was that everyone else was sick of this nuttiness too. All sudden, it was okay to laugh at it and so everyone indulged in hysterical laughter.

This is not to suggest that we will be restoring segregation or that television actors will start casually dropping racial epithets. It simply means that the social movement built around antiracism has reached the end of the line. The quest to eliminate race as a defining feature of public discourse ended with race as the defining feature of public discourse, leaving it with nowhere to go but away. The solution to a racialized public square is a de-racialized public square.

Another way of looking at this is the old expression, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. This refers to the idea that wealth gained in one generation will be lost by the third. The founder starts the business, turning it over to his son who competently manages it. His son then runs it into the ground. There are a lot of variations on this same theme, but all point to the same idea. Regression to the mean is undefeated over a long enough time span.

The concepts of racism and antiracism were created by clever people seeking to capitalize on that gap between the American ideal and reality. They got the social movement going and the next generation established it as a fixture of American political discourse. For a couple of decades, antiracism provided good jobs at good wages to college educated people with no real skills. They just had to show up and play their role, but instead they brought the movement to ruin.

One could also look at the death of racism, the political cause, and its moral claims, as part of the overall decline of the American empire. Racism and antiracism were made possible by the emergence of the American superpower after the two great industrial wars of the twentieth century. This last spasm of racism was made possible by the final victory over the other great ideology to emerge from those wars. Now that the empire is on the wane, its social movements are dying with it.

Regardless of your preferred narrative, there is no escaping the fact that the world has suddenly shifted on the issue of race. The moral center is coming to rest where it belonged all along with regards to race and that it is a private matter. One chooses to live with who they like, for any reason they like. It is not a collective matter. We are seeing the line between the private and public reappear. The first casualty is the concept of racism and its traveling partner antiracism.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Troubled Youth

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Over the last week a dispute has erupted on Twitter about the relative difficulties faced by young people. One camp, current young people, claim they are entering a world that is much more difficult for them than youth of prior generations. They do not think they have the same opportunities as their parents and grandparents. Another camp thinks that young people are entering relatively good times economically but may have unrealistic expectations regarding adulthood.

To be accurate, there is at least one other camp in this debate. That camp thinks the youth face a demographic reality for which they have not been properly prepared and a prevailing culture that works to prevent that preparation. The relative state of the economy for young people does not matter if they are entering a society that is about to come apart along demographic lines. Young white people have been poorly trained up for a world that should not exist.

As is often the case, the two camps squaring off over economics are on the main stage while the camp looking at upstream issues is marginalized. While economics is downstream from demographics and culture, it still matters. We see this with the oldest demographic who remain stubbornly committed to the system. Baby boomers, overall, have it pretty good, so they still believe in the system, even it means they must endure an emergency room that looks like a Tijuana bus stop.

The economic question for young people is difficult, because it is more about expectations than objective measures. For example, about 16% of native-born teenagers have jobs today, compared to 32% in 1990. On the one hand, this is a bad thing because it means fewer young people getting necessary training to be an adult once they finish their education. On the other hand, it means they have an easier time of it than prior generations who had to work.

Those over the age of fifty love telling stories about the terrible jobs they had as young people, while no one under the age of thirty complains about not having had crappy jobs to make ends meet. In fact, the main complaint from college graduates in their twenties is that they have crappy jobs. This is where the great divide opens between those two main camps debating the issue. Old people roll their eyes, because having a crappy job is a rite of passage. Young people see it as a broken promise.

If you are in that third camp, you can see how both sides are right. On the one hand, young people should stop moaning about crappy jobs and being poor, because that is what every generation faced. In fact, prior generations had it far worse. On the other hand, this was not the deal promised to young people who went into debt to get a college diploma. They were told that this investment would let them bypass the struggle portion of their life and get right into the middle-class.

Here you see the root cause of the complaint from young people. The breakdown of order has eroded the social contract. In fact, the social contract is now a terms of service agreement. They were told to click “accept” in high school, but once they exited college, they were told the terms of service have changed. Just in case they objected, they were also told that the privacy policy had changed as well. “Please click accept” quickly became “accept or else.”

There is more to this broken social contract than economics. The conditioning of young people comes with the assumption that if they follow the rules and tick the correct boxes, they will find meaning and purpose in life. Instead, what they find is life in a cubicle, paying off school debts while living at home. Half of college graduates live at home, which is not as high as you might think, but they continue to live at home long after they have left college. That is a novelty.

In effect, young people were sold a program that said if they went to college, took on the debt and followed the rules, they would come out the other end with the sort of fulfilling life they saw in the media. Instead, they are faced with what feels like a pointless existence as an economic unit. That philosophy major at the coffee shop is not just a punch line. She is a bitter victim. Telling her that she now must find her own meaning in this struggle sounds like another lie to her.

That said, the youth of the past did not like working in high school and would have preferred to hang out with friends playing video games. College grads of the past would have preferred to get a job in their field at the same wage as an experienced man, rather than working retail until they could get their foot in the door. The struggle for today’s youth is relatively easy, even if it is the result of a broken promise. In fact, young people probably have it too easy in many respects.

This generational conflict is, in the end, a proxy for the larger conflict which revolves around the failure of the ruling class over the last thirty years. Instead of upholding the rules, especially the rules of the social contract, they turned the country into a smash and grab where everyone is on their own. As a result, the powerful, for example colleges, exploit the weak, their students. It should be no surprise that the victims of such a system are not its biggest fans.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Inequality Of Man

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In the fullness of time, whoever is writing the story of the American experiment will marvel over the fact that the United States never understood itself and as a result, was eventually destroyed in a struggle with itself. A land with vast resources and a capable people could never move past a central problem that stepped off the Mayflower to start the American story. That problem is how can you build a society that derives equality from inequality?

At every step in the American story, we see this conflict. One the one hand, what drives the efforts of the American people is the desire to equalize not only American society, but the society of man. On the other hand, there is the grudging acknowledgment that what lies between here and the egalitarian paradise if the impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. Despite the unconquerable truth of the human condition, what drives America is the desire to overcome it.

This conflict is right there in the founding myths. The colonists rebelled against the symbol of hierarchy and innate inequality, the King of England. They did so on the grounds that all men have the same rights. It is right there in the powerful opening of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the greatest celebration of egalitarianism ever written, but written by a man who was the gold standard of both the natural inequality of man and the necessity of hierarchy.

This contradiction is right there in the life of Thomas Jefferson. He was a man of aristocratic stock, born into a wealthy family. He was living proof that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. He supported the redistribution of land to the poor, despite the fact he was a wealthy planter and slave owner. Despite the reality of his life, he was also capable of expressing the egalitarian spirit in such powerful and direct language that it continues to haunt the nation he helped create.

Modern America, the Global American Empire, is the product of the innate American egalitarianism, but also the willingness to use violence in the unequal relationship between America and the rest of the world. The regular speeches we hear from politicians about America’s role in the world would be familiar to Thucydides. On the one hand those speeches are a form of the funeral oration of Pericles and on the other hand the frank dialogue with the people of Melos.

The present crisis of America is the product of this great contradiction. In his majority opinion in Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Chief Justice John Roberts struggles with this very question. Much of the opinion, in fact, is a recitation of how the country has struggled with this question. Often, Roberts laments that the court has failed to live up to those ideals of equality, but then he acknowledges that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

In his discussion of Plessy, the case that established the doctrine of separate but equal, Roberts argues that despite the intent and the remedies to address defects in the doctrine, the result was institutional inequality in education. Roberts writes, “the
inherent folly of that approach—of trying to derive equality from inequality—soon became apparent.” The remedy was to scrap it entirely in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.

Note that in a 237-page decision lamenting the history of discrimination and challenges in addressing it, the central problem lies in just one sentence. You cannot derive equality from inequality. If Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally, a truth not only visible to the casual eye, but supported by mountains of data, then the equality of man is impossible and any effort to achieve it is folly. Despite this immutable truth, the court continues its quest to reach the egalitarian paradise.

Right there is the beating heart of the current crisis. For going on three generations now, the moral arbiter of America society, the Supreme Court, has demanded that we press ahead with a project it knows is impossible. The moral regime that makes the open society as the highest good and discrimination as the worst evil, which grew from the Brown decision, is all about finding, at long last, some way over or around that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

The moralizing is clear in the text of the decision. Roberts often blurs the lines between legal discrimination and general discrimination, because to make such a distinction suggests the latter is acceptable under the right conditions. Instead, the starting place is the assertion that discrimination is always immoral, but for now certain exceptions must be made until we work out a few things. Affirmative action, for example, is a temporary fix until equality is achieved.

Think about how many social problems could easily be solved by simply acknowledging that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. If the court said that Harvard is a private college and so it can admit who it likes for any reason it likes, this case never sees a courtroom. Public universities, on the other hand, must admit everyone that meets the objective criteria for admissions. Debates over college admissions would vanish instantly.

Simply acknowledging objective reality about human beings would solve many of the problems in present day America, but it is impossible. The belief in the equality of man is too powerful with the managerial class. John Roberts and his staff wrote 237-pages of text to cover over “it is folly trying to derive equality from inequality.” Since the middle of the last century, all efforts have been mustered to defeat that simple truth, but it remains that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Age of Ignorance

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Note: There is no show today, but for those who need to hear my voice, I was on a couple of popular programs over the holidays. I was on with Paul Ramsey and his lovely new cohost, Alicia Bittle. Rumble link. I was also on with Mike Farris. The Rumble link for that is here.

One of the strange aspects of the so-called information age is how little information there is relative to what was expected at the start of this age. At the dawn of the internet, everyone assumed we were on the cusp of a great democratization of information, where everything was available to the public. Not only would the sum of all human knowledge be made available to everyone, but the ability to conceal information, like government secrets, would be near impossible.

It has not turned out like that at all. In many ways, people are more ignorant now than fifty years ago, despite having access to the great data stream. It turns out that you must want the information in order to have it and most people just want to be told what to think. Faced with the great firehose of information called the internet, most people simply find a narrative source to trust. Instead of gathering up the available facts to understand what is happening, people just trust the news.

This was always true, but prior to the internet there was some competition inside the media for an audience. That meant doing genuine reporting. The local newspaper had lots of information about what was happening. One unexpected result of the internet is a mass convergences of mainstream news sources and a narrowing of what is presented to the readership. Look at a aggregation site like this one and you can see the echo chamber that is mass media quite clearly.

The internet killed off local news and the organs that provided it. The days of making a career as a newspaperman covering local events are gone. Along with it the apprenticeship system has disappeared. People entering media as a career now step into a narrow, vertical world where the major regime outlets are at the top and everything below is aimed at feeding people into those major outlets, while echoing everything that comes from those outlets.

It is why we know so little about the Jefferey Epstein case, relative to what should and could be known about it. The major media outlets have little interest, beyond parroting government statements, so there is nothing for the rest of the system to echo and amplify. For example, the two guards that night have been ignored by the media, despite being the second to last people to see Epstein alive. The NY Times does not care about the case, so no one else cares about it.

This is a pattern with most big stories. The lunatic they caught outside of Trump’s Florida villa should be great tabloid fodder. The guy’s internet profile alone makes for great clickbait, but the major media has no interest in him. In the analog age, camera crews would have tracked down everyone who met him. In this age of a trillion cameras, no cameras show up anywhere interesting. The same is true for the kid who allegedly took shots at Trump in Pennsylvania.

There are many ways to describe the modern mass media, but one label that fits is “deliberately uninterested.” There is a weird lack of curiosity in the modern media that defies easy explanation. Sure, the people running the Post or the Times coordinate with the government, but one would think a small outlet would see this gap as a chance to grow their audiences. Instead, even C-list outlets follow the lead of the Times and Post into the great darkness of modern ignorance.

Look at the New Year’s Day terror attacks. Now that the identity of the two people involved are known, it should spawn a million questions. The obvious place to start is the fact that neither man fits the profile. According to the government, for no reason at all, two military men went crazy on the same day. The Vegas guy’s back story makes no sense whatsoever, but so far no one in the mass media has found anything weird about it, much less questioned the government about it.

Both guys were attached to Fort Bragg, which is a pretty big coincidence all by itself, but this is not the first terrorist attached to that base. This alone should spark some curiosity by the media, but when you look closer you see there is a lot of violent crime attached to this base. It is the sort of thing that in a prior age would be the basis for a big expose in a major news outlet. Reporters would have been tasked with asked the government about it, but today it gets ignored.

Even if the Fort Bragg connection is mere coincidence, we will never learn anything about these two cases. The “journalists” will cut and paste some government press releases into their sites and a week from now it will be forgotten. Like the Trump assassins, the major media outlets will simply ignore these stories and so the rest of the media system will ignore them too. In their place will be the latest conspiracy theories around Trump that the Post and Times are peddling.

The great leaving alone that now defines official media is, in part, due to the professionalization of media. In the analog days, the news was a working-class job, so there was a degree of distrust between the media and the ruling class. Today, every journalism student imagines herself as part of the ruling class and one day she will do her part to further the mission of the ruling class. To reach the top of the media system, one must be an unusually good toady.

There is also the fact that the interests of the ruling elites have consolidated, which has resulted in confluence in the media. In the old days, the guy who owned a major newspaper saw the guy who owned a factory or the guy who owned the bank as a rival, so he was fine with his people poking around in their business. He also looked at the government as a potential problem, so maintaining an adversarial relationship with the political class was in his interests.

Financialization has resulted in a narrow economic elite. They are all in the same boat when it comes to how they view society, so they no longer see each other as rivals, and they all depend on the managerial elite to run things. In the media, the result has been a shift in skill selection. In the old days, getting dirt on a banker and a politician doing deals would make your career. Today, what makes your career is building a relationship with them, so they trust you with information.

The shift to access journalism has come with new selection pressure. In the old days, noticing patterns and having a curious mind were rewarded. Today, those are qualities that get you weeded out early in your career. What matters today is the right LinkedIn profile and the right relationships. It a world where curiosity can get you expelled from your social group, in addition to our profession, it is no wonder that everyone in the media is good at never noticing anything.

This also explains the obsession with narratives. Now that the media is absorbed into the managerial class, it is assumed that controlling the narrative is the key to pushing the programs and initiates of the managerial class. As you see inside every large corporation, everyone feels the need to support the latest things and be seen promoting the latest things, so what little imagination and creativity remains, flows into creating and promoting the narratives that support the latest things.

The result of this is we now live in an age of ignorance. The objective facts are often more readily available than in the prior age, but they are so layered in pejorative narratives that they are difficult to locate. With no institutional support in finding and assembling the facts, we are left with narratives that often serve no other purpose than to make the participants feel like winners. The great leaving alone that defines the public square has created an age of ignorance.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

An Early Warning

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The new year has started with a bang, literally and figuratively, as terrorism was the big story on the first day of the year. A Tesla truck exploded outside the Trump building in Las Vegas, killing one and injuring seven. Then there was the car attack in New Orleans, where according to news reports a car went on a rampage killing fifteen people and injuring dozens of others. Police say the driver of the vehicle was not alone and there is currently a manhunt for the others.

The identity of that driver in New Orleans has been released and to no one’s surprise his ancestors were not on the Mayflower. The media is calling him a “Texas man” but he was born to recent arrivals, most likely from East Africa. He served in the military and had various office jobs until he decided to go on jihad. Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar is a good reminder that absimilation is just as likely as assimilation. It is a thing we increasingly see as alien populations increase in the West.

Assimilation means to become like that which you joined. As John Derbyshire observed almost a decade ago, there is an opposite, absimilation, which means to become less similar to that which you have joined. In the case of second and third generation immigrants, this is a common enough thing that it has become the focus of the overall immigration debate. While most absimilated migrants do not go on murderous rampages, many refuse to assimilate on principle.

This is one of the problems with immigration that the Romans understood, but our current oligarchs do not understand. When the alien population is small, the pressure to assimilate is very high. Those who refuse can find little support within their alien community, so they either assimilate or leave. This was the case with 19th century immigration from Europe. Some claim up to a third of European immigrants remigrated because they could not or would not fit into American society.

When the alien population reaches a large enough size, there forms a critical mass of aliens who refuse to assimilate and find enough support within the alien population to survive apart from the main population. This was the lesson of the 19th century when Italians packed into ghettos became a society within a society. It turned out that even in 19th century America, assimilation is not automatic. The more alien the population, the more difficult it is to assimilate them.

Of course, in this age, there is no effort to assimilate these people. Instead, they are encouraged to let their freak flag fly in the name of diversity. Further, there has been intense pressure on the native population to move aside and not demand these new people quickly assimilate into the native culture. The result is second a third-generation migrants who are alienated by the deracinated state of America and encouraged to hate the white population.

That alienation is not just with the migrants. It appears the Las Vegas Tesla attack was done by a white man named Matthew Livelsberger. Like Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans terrorist, Livelsberger was an army veteran and served with Jabber at the same base in Texas. It is looking like these two attacks are connected and the result of a group that may have come together in the military. Long forgotten, Nidal Hasan was in the Army when he went on his rampage.

It should surprise no one that alienated migrants are now finding common cause with alienated natives this way. On the one hand, we have massive importation of people unlikely to assimilate into American society. On the other hand, we have a culture war against the native white population, specifically white men. It is as if the ruling class is trying to create the perfect conditions for terrorism. This is not an unreasonable suspicion, given the performance of the FBI.

Even though these events took place in the new year, they are part of a pattern we saw in 2024 from the FBI and the other security forces. The assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania was due to staggering incompetence. The same is true of the attempt in Florida by a guy who should have been on the FBI radar. Time after time we see that the FBI fails at its basic duties, most likely due to the fact they spend all their time trying to frame people for the latest fads.

As we always see in these terrorism cases, the people involved in this one will have been brought to the attention of law enforcement. The FBI will say they had reports about these people. No one will ask what they did with those reports, because the answer is they did nothing. Their response will be to demand more money so they can frame some people for whatever they will call this stuff. They will pretend they are now on top of this new problem.

Putting aside the FBI malfeasance, this batch of terrorism is a reminder that our rulers have created a tinderbox. The revolt against Musk over the holiday break regarding Indian migrants should be another warning to the oligarchs. To head off much bigger problems down the road, there needs to be an immigration moratorium, including a halt to most “guest worker” programs. Every new arrival is a flammable log on the hot coals of the deracinated American population.

Further, there needs to be a national effort to assimilate the current alien population into the native European culture. Part of this needs to be remigration. Those who refuse to assimilate must leave. Cultural diversity needs to be treated like communism was treated in the 1950’s. It took an economic collapse and world war to assimilate the last great immigration wave. That was with a diverse European population before the major powers had nuclear weapons.

Unless the oligarchs wish to be swinging from trees, they need to head off this looming demographic disaster. Things like diversity and openness are luxury goods that can be indulged in easy times, but the easy times are over, so these leisure habits must be replaced with realism. What the first day of the new year tells us is America has a real problem with its population. That reality can no longer be ignored. To fix it means being realistic about the human condition.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Indian Question

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Fifty years ago, the late political humorist P.J. O’Rourke did a piece for National Lampoon called Foreigners Around the World. It featured exaggerated stereotypes of various races and ethnic groups, along with over-the-top descriptions meant to satirize what was called racism at the time. The piece is preserved online, even though the magazine is long gone. The humor does not hold up, if it was ever humorous, but it is a good starting place for thinking about the immigration debate.

Even when satirizing the idea of racial and ethnic descriptions, the piece cannot help but reflect the hierarchy with regards to how Americans view the world. Fifty years ago, people could be honest about such things, but if you could do a poll today where the respondents are given truth serum, they would most likely rank foreigners similar to how O’Rourke inadvertently ranked them. Of course, the race and ethnicity of the American would play a big role in the ranking.

Black people, for example, would rank Africans at the top and East Asians at the bottom of their list. East Asians would rank Africans at the bottom. White people would rank East Asians at the top, because they see them as the model minority. The tiger mom business a decade ago was driven by upper-middle-class white women who thought the tiger mom explained why the math club was dominated by Chinese kids. Every race and ethnicity have their own ranking.

The one group everyone would put at the bottom, without needing truth serum is South Asians, specifically Indians. Over the last thirty years America has been flooded with migrants from almost every nook and cranny of the globe. Most noticeable are those from South America because of their numbers. In the summer, every business park and suburban neighborhood is littered with Hispanics cutting the grass. The next most noticed group is the South Asians.

Despite their small numbers, relative to Hispanics, South Asians stand out because of their jarring alienness and their reason for being here. Employers import Indians to depress middle class wages and displace American tech workers. As a result, middle-class white people notice them and unlike Hispanics, who white people tend to admire for their work ethic, the Indians have a very negative reputation. Not even the most deluded immigration romantic likes South Asians.

This has come as a great shock to Elon Musk and his tech bros. For some reason he decided to use Christmas Day to announce that he wants Trump to fill your neighborhood with Indians so he can win something. This set off a multi-day firestorm over the topic of Indian immigration. The tech bros were poleaxed by the reaction, as they had no idea how much the average American dislikes Indians. So much so that even yelling “racism” has no impact.

There are a lot of reason for this. Every American has called their bank or the help line for some bit of electronics, only to get someone who is obviously an Indian, despite using an American name. What follows is endless frustration. Of course, we have the stories of Americans being fired and then replaced by Indian guest workers. Now we have the Indian phone scammers targeting old people. During Covid, Indian scammers were on the cutting edge of Covid scams.

Daily, the average American, regardless of his race or ethnicity, is reminded of these alien weirdos who make his life difficult. Much like how gypsies are the one group Europeans are allowed to hate, without being called racist, Indians are becoming that group for Americans. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the origin of the people called gypsies is most likely the Indian subcontinent. Regardless, when it comes to South Asians, Americans of all types have a negative opinion.

There are justifiable reasons for this growing anti-Indian sentiment. The main reason is we do not need Indians. No one has ever said, “This place would be perfect if we fill it up with Indians.” All the arguments in favor of importing Indians do not hold up to scrutiny, so people assume those are deliberate lies. When the official explanation is not trusted, then people are free to conjure their one explanation. Vivek Ramaswamy discovered that when he came out in favor of infinite Indians.

The immediate assumption was that he was in favor of importing his countryman to take your job and take over your neighborhood because they are his countryman. That puts a massive hole in his image as the example of the “New American.” In fact, in one tweet he may have created a majority in favor of not just ending immigration from India, but starting the remigration process. Of course, it also makes it impossible for him to cry racism when he is clearly motivated by race.

Given that Musk and his tech bros were deluged with negative comments, we may have just witnessed a preference cascade with regards to Indians, but perhaps also with immigration in general. Five years ago, Musk would have been able to get away with this, because people would have assumed it was immoral to oppose immigration, much less Indian immigration. Now they are seeing that most everyone around them holds the same negative view of immigration, especially from India.

Immigration patriots are also helped by the fact that the so called tech bros are mostly flim-flam men. Silicon Valley stopped innovating long ago and now relies of financial legerdemain for skim billions for the economy. Vivek Ramaswamy is a pretty good example of this reality. Look at how he got rich and you wonder how he is not sitting in a federal prison, which is itself a reminder that the people promoting Indian immigration are not the most honest people in America.

It is not all good news. In response to getting blasted on his own platform, Musk has rolled out a new censorship scheme so he and his tech bros will not get the sads reading their feed. Regardless of what the people think, the oligarchs are going to plow ahead with their nation wrecking schemes. Even so, as Asad just learned, you cannot rule over a hostile public forever. This Twitter event was not Ceausescu’s famous last speech, but perhaps a foreshadowing of what is to come.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Corporate America

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Just in time for Christmas, the “tech bros”, who jumped on the Trump bandwagon last summer, launched a campaign on Twitter in favor of infinite Indian migration, for all the long ago debunked economic reasons. The trigger for this was Trump naming someone calling himself Sriram Krishnan to an advisory board. This person was a Kamala supporter, in addition to being a strong advocate for bringing all his countryman to live in your neighborhood.

It is unlikely that Trump thought much about Sriram Krishnan before naming him to this advisory board, as it is not an important post. It looks like he took the recommendation of David Sacks, who is running a technology advisory board for Trump. David Sack is an open borders fanatic for all the expected reasons. He spent Christmas day trying to justify Sriram Krishnan’s appointment as “America First”, while also defending unlimited immigration from India.

It was not just David Sacks trying to subvert the meaning of American First. Elon Musk took time away from not celebrating Christmas to push the idea of unlimited immigration from India as well. Like all the tech bros, nation wreckers and open society types, his claim rests on the obvious lie that India is full of future Einsteins that America must recruit in order to win. What we win by turning your neighborhood into a New Delhi slum is never explained, because it is a lie.

This episode is a good reminder that modern America is cursed with one of the worst economic elites in human history. Most of what they do adds nothing to the country or the stock of human capital. Silicon Valley is now just financial flim-flams and financial legerdemain masquerading as a tech sector. Like the Wall Street economy, the Silicon Valley economy is just a skim, not a lot different than how the mafia operated Las Vegas or the Teamsters Union back in the 1970’s.

The main difference between the mafia and the current oligarchs is the mafia knew it was the mafia, while the current oligarchs think they are some weird combination of religious leader and entrepreneurial genius. Elon Musk is Valentine Michael Smith from the Heinlein novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Instead of promising sexual liberation, he is selling motorized doorstops and trips to Mars. The original Valentine Smith came from Mars and this one wants to return.

It is easy to hate the oligarchs as sociopathic greed heads, but they are a symptom of a deeper problem with post-Cold War America. The reason these guys exist is that after the Cold War, America fell into an old bad habit of seeing itself as nothing more than an economic zone to be exploited. This is a current in American history that goes back to the colonies, when the New World was nothing more than an untapped economic zone to be exploited by who got to it first.

This is something Tocqueville observed in his travels around America. There has never been an enduring sense of American identity, other than the idea that making money is the heart of American liberty. The way to avoid the exploitative relationships common in the old world is to maintain a free economy so that anyone can get rich. The concept of “Fuck You Money” is based in this belief. You can get rich enough to not fear coercion from the government or the other rich people.

One main reason people admire Musk is he is the ultimate example of the guy who has achieved “Fuck You Money” status. He is the world’s richest man and the world’s biggest shit poster online. Instead of bending the knee to the Indians running Twitter, he bought the platform for probably two or three times its value. In reality, Musk paid $44 billion for what amounts to a poorly coded message board. He overpaid for it because he has “Fuck You Money”.

Many in the MAGA movement slobber over Musk because of this, but there is an evil that lies behind all of it. Oligarchs like Musk do not see America as their home, but as a company they just acquired. The triumphalism of the tech bros is that they now think with Trump in the White House, they can do what Musk did with Twitter, to the whole country and reorganize it for their purposes. They are the board that took the company called America private and now plan to reorganize it.

This is the next turn of the wheel in the managerial revolution that kicked off a century ago with the rise of the American empire. The large shareholders have become disenchanted with management, so they are shaking things up. The trouble is the shareholders are not American in any meaningful sense. If they think this guy is as American as those with just one passport, then their definition of citizen is no different from their definition of employee.

It is tempting to call this feudalism, mostly because feudalism has an odor about it, but the feudal elite actually had a bond with the peasants. The feudal order started with the reciprocal relationships between the elites, but it also included vertical relations that bound the top to the bottom. The king had a duty to his people. In this age, the oligarch has no duty to his employees. They are mere economic units to be exploited in order to fulfil his obligations to his fellow shareholders.

What we are seeing is an effort to transform the fundamental relations between the citizens and the state, but also among the citizens themselves. Your duty to your neighbor is now the same as your duty to Apu in IT, who was just flown in from Bangalore to replace your neighbor. Everyone is now supposed to see themselves as employees of America Inc., which is now run by people who view you as an expense to be reduced and a liability to be eliminated.

It is not a big leap from using the income statement to justify unlimited Indian immigration to using it to justify involuntary suicide or the deportation of citizens who are no longer working out for American Inc. If economics trump the moral arguments against immigration, then there are no moral arguments that can trump economics when it comes to anything else. Once citizenship is defined as employment, everything and everyone is a slave to the bottom line.

The flaw in this is no rational man will sacrifice for his CEO. The transactional relationship between employer and employee cannot work for a society, because of the fundamental compact at the heart of every human society. The people tolerate and even sacrifice for the elites in a human society, because those elites provide protection through the mechanism of government. If those elites are no longer willing to provide protection, then the reason to tolerate them evaporates.

Perhaps this is the sign that we are fully in late-stage managerialism. The economic elites sense America Inc. is faltering, so they step in to force a change in management, without understanding the root cause of the problem. They view Trump as a turnaround specialist who can reverse the fortunes of the enterprise, while maintaining the transactional relationship between themselves and the people. In the end it must fail because American is not a corporation. It is a people.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Evolutionary Christianity

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Note: Behind the green door I have a post about how the best path to a healthy life is to ignore your health, a post about the bastardization of the college football postseason, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the most important dates on the Christian calendar is Christmas, the day set aside to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. There is a 1-in-365 chance that Jesus was born on December 25, but no one knows when Jesus was born. The date is of no great significance to the life of Christ. What matters is he was lived and died, and his life and death are the root of the world’s most important religion. To Christians, the life of Jesus is the most important event in human history.

Whether Christianity is still the most important world religion is the most important part of that first paragraph, given the state of Christianity in the world. In Europe, where Christianity evolved and flourished in the Roman empire, Christianity is no longer an important part of the culture. The trappings of Christmas remain, largely for commercial reasons, but otherwise Christianity is just about gone. Islam and managerial liberalism are the most important religions in Europe.

In the United States, Christianity remains under assault by the usual suspects but remains an important part of the culture. Even in the secular regions, the cultural framework of Christianity remains in place. God has been replaced by “the tides of history” and Scripture with the latest slop from progressivism, but these things are just filling the hole left in the Christian framework. In the more normal parts of the country, Christian churches still dot the countryside.

There is no question that Christianity is on the wane in the Western world and that spells trouble for the Church globally. It is tempting to wonder if Christianity has a future at all, but the better question is what will it become in the future? The story of Christianity is survival and evolution. What we think of as Christianity today is nothing like what the early Christians experienced. Even medieval Christians would find modern Christianity to be weird and heretical.

For example, early Christians would be puzzled by the reliance on Scripture by many modern Protestant sects. The Gospels were not written until roughly a century after the life of Christ and his disciples. The first “Bible” was assembled by St. Jerome around A.D. 400 and included 27 books of the New Testament. In 382 A.D., the Council of Rome finished the process of determining the 73 books of the Bible. There were probably millions of Christians before there was a single Bible.

Then you have the fact that the Christianity that emerged from the Levant and began to spread around the Roman Empire ran into both Roman paganisms, but also the much more potent paganism of the Germanic barbarians. Many of the things we associate with Christianity were borrowed from these pagans. James C. Russell argues in his book, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, that the culture and religion of Germanic pagans shaped Christianity.

Of course, there are “Bible believing Christians” who reject these claims, but these people are practicing a form of Christianity that could not exist if not for the evolution of the Church into the late Middle Ages. It was the revolution within Christianity that gave us Protestantism and to some degree its secular partner liberalism. The dynamic between the two is a hot topic today in dissident circles. There would be no “Bible believing Christians” without this evolutionary process.

This evolution of Christianity also helps explain why it survived at all. A handful of radical Jews changed the course of human history, by creating something that has motivated men to die for their belief in it. In 303, the Roman emperor Diocletian issued a series of edicts rescinding Christians’ legal rights, setting off a decade of persecutions, just as the early Christian were beginning to codify their faith. Despite this, the Church not only survived, but became much stronger.

There is a good argument to be made that the success of Christianity was due to its struggle in the face of persecution. Early Christians had to be smart, courageous, and resourceful to maintain their religion. This selected for the sorts of people who were willing to take on the enormous challenge of maintaining, spreading, and developing a fundamentally new moral and cosmological outlook. The early Christians had to be to the far right of the bell curve.

Another way to think of it is that Christianity was a new mind virus that quickly evolved to spread among its new host. It then had to evolve even faster once it broke out of its original population. When efforts to eradicate it came, it once again evolved rapidly to adapt to the changes in its host population. Like the common cold or the flu, there are lots of variant of the original Christian virus now. In the end, they all promise the same thing for those infected.

Still another evolutionary way of thinking about how Christianity survived and thrived is that it is a mutation in human thought. Until Christianity, monotheism was limited to Jews and Zoroastrians. Universalism did not exist. These two mutations combined in Christianity and spread through the life, struggle, and death of early Christians until it became a dominant trait. The irony here is that some Christians dispute evolution, but they would not be here if evolution were not real.

The point of all this is not to rustle the sensibilities of those Christians who think the reason for the Church is it is the will and word of God. The point is that Christianity exists at all because it has adapted and survived far worse that the commercialization of Christmas and the “happy holidays” nonsense. Christianity is facing a new challenge in the West, one to which it will have to adapt, while maintaining the thing that has allowed it to survive, which is the hope and courage it provides the believer.

The reason the West is in crisis is the new religion, that which the managerial class struggles to understand, even while they are preaching it, is not able to provide an answer to the questions Christianity has always been able to answer. Those questions are “Who says?” and “Why should I listen?” Men will live and die in defense of the answers to those questions. Whatever Christianity becomes on the surface, it will thrive because it answers the most important of man’s questions.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Promethean Thoughts

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A popular argument in certain circles is that Christianity is to blame for the decline of the West, because it is blamed for various ills in the West. Individualism is often blamed on Christianity, because within most Christian sects, the individual has a unique relationship with God that is not dependent upon his relationship to his society, ethnic group or tribe. Another complaint is that Christianity demands openness, which invites in the sorts of elements antithetical to social solidarity.

There are many variations on this general theme and all of them have some kernel of truth to them. It is the heart of the rather silly argument behind the “woke right” nonsense promoted by crackpots like James Lindsay. He has created a new political scale where one end is any form of exclusivity, which he calls “woke” and the other end is complete openness, which he calls “classical liberalism.”  It is mostly nonsense, but it does illustrate the anti-Christian claims about liberalism.

Professional Christians do themselves no good in this regard by embracing and celebrating nation wrecking ideas like open borders, diversity, the worship of nonwhites and an obsession with Israel. Most low-church ministers sound like the tourism minister from Israel fused with the HR manager at a major corporation. Of course, the more traditional churches are in deep with open borders, often getting government contracts from people who would like to stamp out Christianity.

In the final reckoning, the Christian churches and their entrepreneurial advocates will have much to answer for over their role in the crisis of the West. The question is whether this is the logical result of Christianity, or is it a novelty that grew from the spread of liberalism, particularly the American form of it. After all, 18th century Christians were not in favor of open borders, and they certainly did not think the worship of Israel was their reason to exist.

For those looking to absolve Christianity, that is the starting point. From the conversion of Europe into the 16th century, Christianity fit neatly into and was an integral part of the feudal order that ruled Europe. The Church provided a moral framework for the secular rules, but also provided a moral authority for them. The Church was the ultimate answer to the question, “who says?” whenever it was not obvious that the king was the person with final authority in his domain.

It is only when people started to question the set of reciprocal obligations and duties that defined the European political order that we see changes in the relationship between Christians and the prevailing social order. The Protestant revolution was as much a result of the weakening political order as it was disputes over the traditions and practices of Christians. In other words, the changes in the political order can be blamed for the revolution within Christianity.

Further context is the fact that the Church was a different thing in the later Middle Ages than what it was at the end of the Roman Empire. The Christianity that evolved to flourish and survive within Rome, had to further evolve after Rome. It continued to evolve to flourish within the new feudal order that defined Europe. Once the feudal order began to collapse, the Church evolved to adapt, often with localized versions to meet localized political changes.

The same framing can be applied to America. In the New World, the old religion was free to evolve and do so under unique circumstances. The Calvinism of the Old World arrived in New England, along with Anglicanism and Presbyterianism. Soon, every Christian sect of the Old World was setting up shop in the New World, quickly evolving and splintering into new versions to meet new conditions. America was a great experiment for more than just self-government.

What we call progressivism has its roots in this Christian experiment. A century ago, progressive literature was riddled with references to Scripture. The reason for that is it had its roots in Christian movements like abolitionism, social reform movements and the Social Gospel movement. The argument against slavery that animated the Civil War were not economic or political in nature. The abolitionists were acting upon their sense of moral justice informed by their Christin faith.

The way to understand America since Gettysburg is to think of it as a religious crusade masquerading as a country. The covenantal form of nationalism that still turns up in our politics has roots in the founding the country. Northern nationalism in the Civil War, for example, was linked to America’s alleged destiny to free the world. It was not enough to celebrate self-determination. America had a duty to help all people free themselves from domination and that started with the South.

This is the error people make when trying to blame liberalism for the current crisis or blame Christianity for the liberalism. American liberalism of the type the Framers embraced was replaced by a variant that borrowed the modes of thought from Protestant Christianity but eventually left out God and Scripture. The hole of authority has been filled with vague concepts like the “tides of history” and other expression that can be replaced with “the side of the angels.”

This creates a dilemma. It is clear that Christianity in the Old World evolved to meet the challenges of the changing political order, driven by the spread of Old World liberalism, but it is also clear that the new forms of Christianity informed that liberalism, and in the case of America, created a fusion of the two. That new ideological and theological cause, dressed in the garb of reason and pragmatism, then dominated the West, at the point of gun, until we have reached this point.

In the end, blaming liberalism or Christianity is a fool’s errand. The root cause probably goes much further back. For example, universalism is only possible in a cosmology that has just one God. In a world of many gods, there are many sources of moral authority, so therefore no one can claim a single moral order. Then you have the curse of reason that was given to us by the Greeks. If there is one God and one morally correct way of living, then our reason should be able to discover it.

The good news for the Christians is that the religion has shown an ability to adapt that no other faith has managed. Judaism has survived for longer, but only as a folk religion serving a tiny minority. Christianity has survived as a majority religion, through the ups and downs of Western civilization. Despite its current condition, it will most likely adapt and once again give cause to the flourishing of Western people. The same fate probably does not await liberalism or progressivism.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.